Movies: Urbanism

Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a camping site near Takumi's house offering city residents a comfortable "escape" to nature....

Nanni Moretti recalls in his diary three slice of life stories characterized by a sharply ironic look: in the first one he wanders through a deserted Rome, in the second he visits a reclusive friend on an island, and in the last he has to grapple wit...

Writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs fights to save historic New York City during the ruthless redevelopment era of urban planner Robert Moses in the 1960s....

This documentary presents a before-and-after picture of people in a large-scale public housing project in Toronto. Due to a housing shortage, they were forced to live in squalid, dingy flats and ramshackle dwellings on a crowded street in Regent Park...

The war zone of a dystopian multiplayer shooting game is used to embark some urban explorers on a winter walk, avoiding the combats whenever possible, as peaceful observers, inhabitants of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manha...

An ancestral house builds itself, comes to life, and shows us its story spanning one hundred fifty years. Through the ages, it allows us to perceive the passage of time....

A short documentary on the River Ouse, following it downstream from Lewes to Newhaven, meditating on the surrounding area....

Sundance award-winning director Julia Kwan’s documentary Everything Will Be captures the subtle nuances of a culturally diverse neighbourhood—Vancouver’s once thriving Chinatown—in the midst of transformation. The community’s oldest and newest member...

A solitary man struggles to cultivate beauty in a desolate urban world. Lonely and dislocated, he drifts in and out of a dream state envisioning the promise of regeneration. ROSEWATER tells a story of hope sustained through perseverance, ritual and, ...

A young architect embarks on an ambitious real state development project in Brasília, convinced that he could actually help transform people’s lives and build a new form of society. But his utopia begins to fall apart when his dreams get in the way o...

This haunting, beautifully crafted animation is set in a not-so-distant dystopia where lonely, suspicious pack dogs set the boundaries of their world amidst the remains of human presence. Within the confines of this border, the best and worst of anim...

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Canada is facing a housing crisis, and cooperative housing might be a part of the solution....

Exploration of the territory in a delirious time-space journey through the largest Megalopolis in America....

This short documentary features a portrait of Ottawa in the mid-20th century, as the nascent Canadian capital grew with force but without direction. Street congestion, air pollution, and rail traffic were all the negative results of a city that had g...

A young woman wakes up on a train going to an unknown destination. She has no recollection of how she got there or where she is. She finds herself in a vast city; a forest of steel and iron and concrete, wandering the dark streets....

A group of people in a dystopian future is led through the last forest in existence. Plants? What were they again?...

Amina, Sami and Jennyfer are high school students in the Paris suburbs, in 93. At the initiative of 3 of their teachers, they embark on an unexpected investigation into a gigantic leisure park project which involves concreting agricultural land near...

In the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, an effective government policy of controlling land investment prevents speculation, keeps land prices down, and provides a good balance between commercial, residential and public areas....

This short documentary film is a fascinating portrait of urban and rural Quebec in the late 1960s, as the province entered modernity. The collective work produced for the Quebec Ministry of Industry and Commerce calls on several major Quebec figures....